The Cloud Report

Workday Extends SaaS Portfolio with Big Data Analytics Module

Workday, one of the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, this week launched a big data analytics module to add to its portfolio of human resources and financial applications.

Delivered at the company's seventh annual Workday Rising conference in San Francisco, the new Workday Big Data Analytics is a key component of the company's latest update to its SaaS offerings called Workday 20. Workday Big Data Analytics gathers data from its portfolio as well as other data sources to help individuals develop specialized reports and benchmarks.

"For our customers, big data is about opening up the Workday cloud to import non-Workday data to more readily make business decisions," wrote Dan Beck, the company's vice president of product management.

Templates offered for those in HR include a market compensation comparison tool that gathers payroll data and industry salary averages from internal and external sources, headcount analysis to determine risks in workforce planning and one that helps determine performance of employees. Finance templates include one that helps a company determine its performance in comparison to competitors, sales performance reports and customer profitability analyses.

Partners including Deloitte Consulting and IBM Global Business Services have developed their own templates that, respectively, measure manager effectiveness and attrition reporting.

In addition to the big data analytics tool Workday 20 includes the release of its Notebooks on iPad, which lets managers gather worker profiles on the tablets and render reports on them.